Meanderings and Wanderings II – For Nurdan

Ian Whitney

Antiquity has its place, you know. One wanders through the spaces among the stones, listening for the voices…it is a quiet listening, from within, windless sound brought forth from places in the mind and the heart on the breezes of the present. ‘Timelessness’ connotes a too linear experience. Existence is everywhere and nowhere as the sand blows through the silence and the stones shift softly…juxtaposed, the painter’s blues, greens, dark magenta that move across canvases unveiling layers of experience: births, loves, losses, pain, joy…but mostly life…life lived in the stones set in the sands so deep a leg sinks in up to its knees and struggles to recover itself.

Who lived here? Why these stones, so carefully and carelessly chosen? So often, stones are seen unconsciously stained with rivulets of blood…bleeding memories that cannot be healed without struggle. The painter cools these images, reshaping them…not diminishing, but reforming, re informing their character, their complexity, changing the memories from two-dimensional, two-bit, pieces of information into depths as moving and multi-dimensional as the sea or the universe….

It is odd to come upon these images all of a moment on a summer’s silent evening…a delightful surprise, a cooling rinsing of the dust, the stifling air, the bad, irritating and annoying distractions. Suddenly, the air is fresh and clean again, smiles forgotten leap from the facial muscles as the body moves forward to examine the images, to try and enter, walk through the spaces of stone, of time, of other people’s lives who have consciously invited the viewer in. Laughter springs from the vocal chords and rings like music through the evening air with the joy of discovering that others have not given up hope, that others have taken the hearts, their lives in their hands and fearlessly walked up to the stones and placed them for all to see…a single woman stands alone, smiling, happy, modest, her stories surrounding her, lifted up by the soaring and confining walls built centuries ago. The jarring technicalities of lighting fixtures of walls too high that dwarf the humans below are forgotten. At the human level, the courage has won the battle. The blues of a painting hanging alone on the stone bring the finality of the stone and its nuances of oppression, violence and death into the seas of life from which it came…All is full circle now and ready for new beginnings….it is the bringing forth of life from stone and sea and sand, from the desolation of isolated, fragmented modern lives and the rigidity of humanity’s past mistakes that these paintings, these stories of the woman, a mother, a wife, an artist and explorer, that transform and invite the mind into a new awareness, a new consciousness, another way of seeing….

Meanderings and Ramblings 1

Ian Whitney

There was a storm, an orange-cloud storm swirling of red dust and turning the sky, the air, the buildings into a maelstrom of soundless sounds. They resonated through the air as the vortex in its freedom sucked them in, only to throw them to the edges of consciousness. The khamasin roars for 50 days or more some years. Driving a path of burning wind straight from the Sahara, it moves the earth and reshapes the landscape. Its sculpting erases. Some say it is Nature’s way of showing forgiveness, erasing the emotions, the words, the deeds, the lives of the past leaving a ‘clean slate’. She could not be as generous as Nature, though she had tried. Forgiveness was for God. How could she? When she tried, inevitably the forgiven were undeserving and turned the swords they stabbed in her back once again, with a laugh. Her back was strong. So, she began another way to follow Nature’s examples. It was simple. She took a piece of cloth and poured into it all the memories, the thoughts, the rage. And then, she tied it to a tree. A little piece of cloth for those who had been taken, for her hopes, her future, her heart. A little piece of cloth tied to the tree during the 50 days when Al-Khamasin blew. She trusted Nature. Nature would take the cloth up in its magnificent, whirling, red arms and cleanse it as it pulled it in, farther and farther into its center. Once clean again. Once pure again, the cloth would be thrown out into the edges of the world again for another chance.

This was how she had lived, in metaphors and symbols. She wanted to speak, but words would not come. There had been a time when her voice floated through the air like a songbird, an evening call on the wind. That was long ago, it seemed to her now. The songs were still there, but since the first time they had killed the music, in her last days of youth, the songs had hidden themselves. They darted in and out for a while, trying to cheer her to give her direction, to relight her passion, her belief that good things happened to good people, not bad things. As time went on, their sounds curved ever more inward, distant reminders of a porch swing, lilacs and the sounds of laughter. And, now, she told herself, they rested, safe behind the stone walls, the steel and concrete she had built around her heart to protect them. Those notes were her children, the unborn that someday, she was certain, would be born. They understood metaphors best, so it was for them that she had carried out this way of communicating. When she was a child herself, she had written a poem she had titled ‘for the anonymous sunbeams’. It had been while sitting at a table, watching the sun play on the lake at summer camp, that the phrase had just jumped into her head. Sounding out ‘a-non-y-mous’ had been one of her half conscious mantras those few weeks, along with other new words whose sounds flew by her so quickly, she could not quite catch them. So, this repetition to herself of what she had thought she had heard. No one in her family ever had time or patience with her to sound it out. She was too old and they only laughed at her when she mispronounced the words she couldn’t understand in lyrics on the radio. So, this quiet regimen had become a frequent habit and a safe haven to withdraw to, when shocking, surprising things happened, particularly when anyone paid her attention that she didn’t understand. She knew that if she could not understand it, whatever it was, was likely to have elements of danger to her in it. It might only be sneering laughter at her large stomach, or at an idea she had expressed or a question she had asked, but there was danger in those mocking voices and straightening the back was easier when she withdrew inside, never letting her eyes wander from their forms. Deep inside, words were being sounded out, slowly, group by group, as she quietly faced her challengers. They kept her still. She was not even conscious of them. For her, everything was silent and quiet inside her. She only knew that until the danger passed she shouldn’t move in any other direction except straight up, in one place, silent and staring. The tactic inevitably worked and the danger slipped away. Many years later when she met a black cobra, coiled and ready to spring, only a few inches from her sports clad shoe in the jungle of autumn India, it was this same series of events that took place. Perhaps it was because she had been sounding out the words she heard and tried to remember from Hindi and understand what she was hearing in Marathi, that had put her back in the practice. What took her to that place of stillness and absolute quiet as the cobras eyes turned towards her, its profile steady and its forked tongue flicking out to taste the fear she thought it probably was praying as hard as they were was not there, may have been something else completely, but it worked, the king slowly lowered himself after making sure no one was moving, and slid quietly away to the opposite side of the ancient stone steps that had been leading them to the caves below.As she had watched the black, curving line extend itself and move slowly over the white stone into the golden-green of the woodland beyond, she had been amazed. The contact had been as between humans, between the most magnificent royalty to those who had been allowed into his court and for whom he had opened the gate for them to pass through. She had been content with the honor, for in the next moments she remembered nothing. She only became conscious of what she was doing when she had reached the top of the stairs. Why she had run blindly away, she couldn’t say, What she could say was that although she remembered nothing, inside she had remained perfectly calm. The message to her had seemed more a warning and the example of the royal’s actions, slipping away into familiar places, had been a suggestion her logic had accepted as both practical and expedient. There had been four of them, the human court, and the snake, knowing its power had retreated in dignity and grace. She had run, clumsy and awkward, but she had understood the message well so that even after the exertion she had not been out of breath despite the 30 or so stairs she had dashed.  She had remained quiet in the storm….

Bird of Paradise opening

White Desert,Egypt 1997 Photo by Ian Whitney

It was a flower that started it. A bird of paradise that opened in front of her eyes. She had almost missed it, her eyes so continuously locked to the screen in front of her. Something, though, made her turn…and she caught it, the moment of unfurling. It was a second, maybe less than that. So quickly did it happen that her first reaction was skepticism. So, she returned to ‘the screen’ and then, surreptitiously moved her eyes sideways as she shifted her weight and ever so slowly pulled back her shoulder. The event had been real and another metamorphosis was taking place as she completed her revolution towards the setting. She tried it again and again and every time she turned, more of the flower had stretched its bright, orange petals up and outward to reveal the hidden deep purple center they had been protecting. And,it was not only the bird of paradise but one of the orange lilies had joined in the dance of morning leading the way for the two small ivory and crimson-tipped roses to follow. A miraculous celebration, this dance of the flowers. She could not get enough. Each petal a living dancer, an artist of grace and elegance. It was a true tour de force, the silent awakening to light and she with her cats, the only audience….

The miracle had moved her, her tears like morning dew fell into the room. Such hope, such beauty and so sad that there was no one with heart or mind to share it with. They missed these moments, those others. Their veins poisoned with vanity, ego, jealousy of everything and everyone they saw only the static, the sand and never noticed how it was slipping through their fingertips as they shouted everyone down…she thought, you only have to change one vowel to transform ‘shout’ into ‘shoot’….do they see the flowers anymore? She thought not. It seemed as though they only saw themselves or what they wanted to believe were themselves. And then, with a shock, she realized how she herself had turned a miracle of innocence and light into negativity and darkness…with only her own ego-driven thoughts…

That was how it had started: her search for a way to remain in the moments of miracles…

Writing pad draft India excerpt

White Desert, Egypt 1997 photo by Ian Whitney

Writing again…that is, writing with my muse not my academic mind…no more analyses,critiques, absolute judgements, structures and forms without flexibility without space, without air for someone else, for others’ dreams. No, writing again, the first painful exhalations and inhalations leave me wondering if the breathing will continue at all. Space and air release tension. The cold breeze from the open window at my back braces me for the attempt like a mountain climber pushed by wafts of currents up a sheer stone cliff. I climbed a small stone cliff once, in bare feet on granite, in India. I had never realized that the human body could climb at such a steep angle in bare feet and accomplish it so much more easily than in the ‘right’ shoes. It was exhilarating! The view from the top was not impressive, though I had been told it would be. Coming after seeing the discarded snake-skin of a python that stretched the entire length of a very long ledge, the view had had a challenge facing it. Perhaps on another day it would have amazed but not that day. It was the climb, it was finding the courage to continue past that cast off skin and stretch new and long, free and barefoot up an almost impossible angle of smooth granite. I felt that doing that meant that I could face anything, anyone, anywhere.

The gift of that day had been sorely needed for a long time, but particularly since the previous Christmas Eve. Alone, in India but not without new found friendly acquaintances, I received a letter tied in string with a seal in wax on it. The well-meaning proprietor and village had kept it in their hands for some time as a ‘surprise’ . Ah, when people do not really understand the subtext and the meaning, their good intentions sometimes cause pain they never wished it to…It was an awful letter, an awful shock, unfair, unjustifiable and evidence of the immaturity, insanity and childishness of the powerful against the defenseless- meaning myself, of course. It was the last time I was really angry for myself and the following months were the last time I really ever felt that I had found myself again after years of leaving myself open to whatever the messages of destiny and the world of human beings had for me. I travelled the length and width of India after that, was highjacked on a train – another story, another time – and almost made it to the border on a tour bus that was turned around in the middle of the second line of tanks. On the way back we saw dozens of peacocks, their tails open or dragging through the sands of the Thar Desert. They were not alone, the brilliant blues and hues and gold glistening in the sun, chasing the images of green metal and long instruments of death far from our consciousness. There camels roaming just as freely over the dunes. We, the tourists from everywhere, from Asia, from Europe, from the Americas pulled out our cameras, begged the bus to stop and settled for what we could get as the requests were ignored in a wild ride to get as far from the border as possible.

Wandering through the spaces

I used my sunglasses for a filter to take this shot in the White Desert, Egypt in February, 1997 while on a weekend safari with colleagues.

There is something that happens when you don’t know that you have crossed a border. As you meander on your way, stopping here and there to take in the view, explore the landscape or cityscape or villagescape a detail of difference catches your eye and you realize that you are in a different place. You had not actually planned to be in a different place, but there you are, in an entirely new world that unfolds before you in small waves of light that wash the dust from your eyes. You raise your head from the detail, slowly, and then with the caution of the wanderer begin looking more deeply at what stretches out before you.

Other times the border confronts you stoically in boots and armor demanding of you your permission to pass the invisible line between one place and another. In these moments, confusion and chaos as the illusory stability you thought you had been standing on, slides away beneath your feet and for a moment you know you are floating. There is an intense awareness of the power of the boots and the armor to send your momentary levitation into crashing disarray through the chasms of the abyss below you. You struggle to regain some ground, something familiar to quell the rising panic at the fear the boots and armors have evoked. In that moment when you have become one with the invisible line that divides one space from another, the self pulls into the blankness of existence. It withdraws into numbness that is not heavy but releases no hint of fear, no biochemical to alert the forked tongue of danger, and when you have withdrawn into that space, you float alone and unafraid, supported only by the power of silent strength. The epiphany, the light emerges from your innermost being, a cup of simple and absolute clarity drawn from the well within you and you watch the ambassadors of fear slide away with their dignity and yours, intact.

These moments of challenge, of crossing borders whether in the physical world or in the eye of the mind, occur unceasingly, yet it is the borders that challenge through fear that we give the most power too. I find that sad. For it isn’t so much the fear of danger in these everyday crossings as it is the banality of the evil of fear because we believe that through fear we conquer. We give fear more power than love, the challenge to overcome something before us than to the nostalgia of departure, or the anticipation and hope of what we envision lies ahead. There are a myriad, a universe, no universes of feelings that stir within us in our border crossings, yet it is fear’s ambassadors that demand our attention. In the Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese, P. Jiang has identified 3,700 words that describe affective emotions. How many are there in English? It is true that not all affective emotions are negative, as affective words are words that arouse emotions of all kinds. But even the word joyous encompasses a wide,wide range of emotions bounded by the finite limit, the finite set of the single word. Yet, it is fear, its singularity alone reveals the power of its impact, that we struggle to quell and when quelled find in ourselves a source of confidence in the exhibition of self-control. The power of a single word like the invisible borders of countries separates one space from another and it is we who must exist between borders, between worlds, suspended in space and time who must smooth the contours of the spaces within them so that crossing frontiers no longer is a matter of facing fear to prove that one exists, but a constant adapting of a single unit, the self, as it swims and floats seamlessly through the varying spaces of our geometries.

Christmas Season 2009

Kenny G is playing again and its Christmas…tears and sadness, gratitude and kindnesses unimagined and unexpected…friends from the past…memories…joys and delights so long sought for have appeared this past year…a life that was fading, a hope almost gone…truths that wrung my heart, almost shattered my soul…it was time to know…to hear…to let go…and, now,its Christmas again, a time to begin, again…and smile at the thought of a childhood friend making snow angels and watching White Christmas with her granddaughter…the legacies that matter go on and are never forgotten…and, my father as I remembered him, in his suit and tie, elegant and handsome bending over to comfort me before he went on…in a dream, in dreams there is solace,in the past remembered the hopes forgotten rekindled…

So, dream and wish and believe and never let the music fade…the paths through the stars are there…

Fiscal Pear & Shimmer in The Call of River Whale (Paperback)

Fiscal Pear & Shimmer in The Call of River Whale (Paperback)
by Olivia Brooks-Scrivanich (Author)
Key Phrases: ocean shimmers, pear light, butt rot, Fiscal Pear, Bakery of Pears, Butt Rott Root (more…)

What people are saying about Fiscal Pear:
“Magical” – Toni Morrison
“I loved this book. Highly recommended” – Midwest Book Review
“Extremely Imaginative and suspenseful” – Stories for Childrens Magazine

Rowing across an ocean…that’s how I feel, as though I am rowing across my own private ocean where even fish are rare companions…it is a nice comfort zone…people believe whatever they want to believe, even to the point of absolute absurdity… I admit that I am no exception…but while I row, I can believe what I want and reassure myself about what IS true; what memories are real; what is imagined and what has actually been experienced…it seems that the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century were years of the mind twist: the years of the denial of truth, the rewriting of history, even personal histories and the creation and recreation of multiple selves by others…they were years of constant storms. Waves crashed over us poor human beings, forcing change in some cases, while in others a fierce determination to hold on to one’s identity and memory grew stronger with each false identity they were presented with. Remembering became the only way to preserve the experiences of the past as individuals, organizations and governments sought to erase and rewrite over and over again in fear that they would be discovered or lost…or maybe they did it just for the game, I don’t know…What I do know, is that it happened to individuals, cultures, countries and even the life itself…Some were rewritten as knowledge and technology advanced. Others were rewritten out of envy and maliciousness….its saddest of all when the rewrites were of the identities and experiences of the innocent, particularly of the children…

So, I have repeated the stories to myself in many venues and at many different times. I have turned them inside out, and around and all about watching as the same pieces fall into different slots…but the pieces, the memories, the experiences never change…they are sometimes added to and the twisting and turning has revealed memories or interpretations long forgotten…age has brought with it another view, other ways of understanding what hadn’t been understood…it is disconcerting on some occasions to find the falseness of one’s own self-righteousness-or the rightness of it…how powerful are our thoughts in creating who we are, and how powerful are our fears of the power of others’ thoughts in that same act…

We are malleable and resilient creatures though. Our minds are our allies and our enemies. Our imagination our greatest gift and worst nightmare. As we struggle to know who we are and to hold on to increasing large bodies of data as well as to manipulate that data in favour of our own will, we often feel we are in the ocean, not on its surface. So, yes, rowing across one’s own ocean provides a feeling of control; of independence; of freedom that can never be taken away because there is nothing, nothing that can take away the essential ‘you’ or ‘I’….

Ian Whitney 2007

Hello world!

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Here are several sites where you can find out a little more about me. I wrote the text for The Lithographs of David Roberts in English. I believe it is still available from The Palm Press and at Volume I in Egypt. This is a link to booksellers who have the French translation.

ROBERTS DAVID (TEXTES DE IAN WHITNEY) Les lithographies de David Roberts. Egypte et Nubie.
Cairo/Le Caire, The Palm Press, 2005. 30,5×22,5cm, 72 pp. Drawings & lithos by David Roberts (1796-1864). Textes en français. Planches en couleurs de l’Alexandrie, Giza, Le Caire, Louxor, La Nubie, Sinaï. Avec cadre historique. As new/comme neuf/wie neu/als nieuw
€ (euro) 20.00 [Appr.: US$ 29.46 | £UK 18 | JP¥ 2685] Book number: 20050065
Click here to order or inquire at MERS Antique Books Antwerp. http://www.antiqbook.com/books/viewcat.phtml?o=mers&c=EGYPT

The chapter by Ann Marlow Riedling talks about some work we did together when I was responsible for the English Language Reader Services etc at the American Research Center in Egypt’s, William Kelly and Marilyn Simpson Library here in Cairo, Egypt. (I worked there from July 1997 to the end of 2000-Thanksgiving)Read More
Thinking outside the book: essays … – Google Books
Source: books.google.com
http://books.google.com/books?id=nSlgbjYbwm8C&lpg=PT252&ots=-xQYo3JAJu&dq=ian%20whitney%20egypt&pg=PT252#v=onepage&q=ian%20whitney%20egypt&f=false